Onlining Old Art Catalogues

A few weeks ago I noted that a couple of museums were beginning to explore making content more available via the web: LACMA posted a few catalogue essays, lots of museums now have Flickr streams, and so on.

Here’s a logical next step: Putting old, long out-of-print exhibition catalogues online, Google Books-style. LACMA, which has apparently decided to challenge the Indianapolis Museum of Art for the title of Most Web-Creative Museum, has launched an entire site dedicated to its 1967-71 Art & Technology project. You can browse the project online artist by artist or you can download the project catalogue as a PDF. At LACMA’s Unframed blog, Tom Drury discusses why the whole project is exceptional. (Aside: Why don’t more museums put old catalogues/scholarship online this way? No idea.)

The provenance of James Turrell’s Afrum (White) can be traced back to the Art and Technology exhibition of 1971. We’ve recently made it easy to learn about this fabled show by putting its catalogue online. Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound that exciting, but trust me. It’s a different kind of catalogue—candid, original, and often very funny. “I loved the catalogue,” the sculptor Claes Oldenburg once said. “It’s full of gossip and history and time passing and attitudes.”

It was written by then-LACMA curators Maurice Tuchman and Jane Livingston and entitled A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1967–1971. It tells the story of how LACMA, then around two years old, set out to place artists within high-tech corporations to see what would happen. Two exhibitions resulted, one at the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970 and one at LACMA the following year.

What makes the catalogue so compelling is its unconventional tendency to disclose everything: who backed the project and who was skeptical, contracts and letters, successes and dead ends, tales of the mutually beneficial interactions that resulted (notably Robert Irwin and James Turrell’s work with the Garrett Corporation) and of the mutually baffling (see John Chamberlain and the Rand Corporation). And all conveyed in a candid, deadpan style that makes the whole thing pretty charming. Here is the last line of an entry about Donald Judd, who exchanged letters (included) with the curators but did not end up participating: “Judd did not contact us while in California in September, 1969 and we could not locate him.”